Excerpt, Midnight Curfew #3
Trace speeds down the dirt road, passing a few homes and businesses along the main street, and then swings the car around in a U-turn, pulling up in front of his house. Half a dozen trucks and other vehicles are parked outside, the downstairs lights illuminating the windows.
We hop out, and I look next to the fence, seeing my Rover still parked where I left it.
“Son of a bitch!” someone bellows from inside the house. “I could’ve been killed!”
I inhale a deep breath. Iron Jaeger. One of Trace’s older brothers. I know his voice by process of elimination. He’s the only one I rarely hear yell, and I know all the others’ voices. If it were Macon, the oldest, I’d probably just turn around and leave.
Guys come barreling out the front door, running down the walk and out into the rainy dirt road. Their girlfriends wait by the cars, laughing and shielding themselves from the weather.
Music inside makes the house vibrate as the Seminole flag blows over the garage door. Ivy and moss climb the exterior of the ancient pink stucco of the dilapidated Spanish mission-style mansion, and I inhale like I always do, because you can eat the air here.
Stepping through the arch of the heavy wooden front door, I hear one of the shutters on the second or third floor flapping against the house. Screams pierce the air, and I wince as more people rush toward me.
I leap, Trace pulling me into his arms and out of the way. The music cuts off as they squeeze past me, out the door.
“What the hell is going on?” I mumble.
But Army Jaeger, the second-oldest, answers instead. “An alligator slithered into the pool.”
He pulls on a T-shirt. His black hair is soaked, drops of water sliding over the giant octopus tattoo that spills over his shoulder and onto the left side of his chest. I used to think he rarely wore a shirt because he knew how good he looked without one, but I eventually figured out that he simply liked to save time.
When his brothers aren’t causing him enough trouble, he’s taking care of his infant son.
At twenty-eight, he’s the only one with a kid.
“Iron fell in when we tried to haul it out,” he adds.
Of course he did. One of the Jaegers is always on the verge of getting killed.
“Is everyone okay?” I ask.
But he just waves me off, grabbing a baseball bat from behind the coatrack. His short dark hair gleams with water. “Yeah, just keep your eyes peeled. We lost it, but it could be hanging around. We’re going to search for it.”
Awesome. I look over, seeing Iron throw back his beer, muscles tense and his clothes soaking wet. His black hair is slicked back. He started growing it out this summer, and his tan is still deep everywhere I can see. The vein in the side of his neck bulges underneath a tattoo.
But then another Jaeger steps up. “Great,” Dallas says in a snide tone. “Trace calls, you come running.”
Dallas’s green eyes are always looking at me like he’s imagining me on fire.
I turn my attention back to the remnants of the party and the damage in the living room. “We drove, actually.”
Trace lets out a chuckle and tosses a flashlight to his brother. “Be careful.”
Dallas takes it, pushing his hair back over the top of his head and slipping on a ball cap. He’s a year older than Trace. Twenty-one. And he doesn’t like me.
He doesn’t like me a lot.
Army, Iron, Dallas, and Trace. That’s four.
Army’s infant son, Dex, bawls upstairs.
“Why’s that kid still up?” Dallas barks.
“Because y’all are too fucking loud,” his father growls, heading out the door.
A girl calls after him. “Army, seriously. Should I wait in Liv’s old room or what?”
I look over at the half ponytail on top of her head and the bright red lipstick that matches her tight skirt and shirt. I cross my arms over my chest, covering the paint stain from helping Paisleigh with her art earlier tonight.
But Army just tells her, “Stay out of my sister’s room.”
He bolts through the door with Dallas as Iron starts to follow, swallowing down the rest of his bottle.
“How are you?” I ask him.
He doesn’t look at me, just shakes his head and sighs as he sets the beer down.
My grandfather is the district judge who always seems to have Iron in his courtroom for one arrest or another. Breaking and entering, theft, and, most recently…assault. Iron loves to get into fistfights. Something he still hasn’t grown out of at twenty-four years old.
Unfortunately, his luck ran out this summer. His last arrest resulted in bail, a court date, and finally a plea bargain. He’ll serve time. He has to surrender in a week.
I’m not responsible, but I also feel like I shouldn’t be in his house.
“Iron, you coming?” Dallas calls out.
Iron casts me a look, his eyes softening with the hint of a smile.
An hourglass with a snake wrapped around it is inked on the side of his neck, and several more tattoos cover his body.
I’ve never looked at length, but I know he has a palm tree with Sanoa Bay’s latitude and longitude on his forearm, and a huge alligator on the bottom left of his back.
He shrugs. “Nothing better to do, I guess, right?”
I half smile back, always liking him. Maybe even more than Trace.
Iron is completely different around women and children.
I once saw him stop and park his motorcycle, take an old lady’s groceries, put them in his saddlebags, and drop them at her house so she wouldn’t have to carry them.
It was kind of funny, because she thought he was stealing them at first and tried to hit him.
Now they’re on a first-name basis, and she has him run her husband and his wheelchair to physical therapy for her once in a while. Not on the motorcycle, of course.
Engines start up outside as Iron, Dallas, and Army leave. Trace stays behind, and I have no idea where Macon is, but the garage was closed when I got here. If he’s home, that’s where he is.
No parents.
Just five brothers.
All in the same house.
I think some of them want to move out, but they wouldn’t know what to do without each other on a daily basis.
“Drink?”
I glance at Trace as he twists off the tops of a couple of beers.
The same hourglass with a snake wrapped around it rests against his skin, forged in iron, and secured with three thin leather bands around his right wrist. All of his brothers wear the same bracelet.
It’s the Tryst Six family crest. Tryst after their mother, Trysta, and Six because there are six children.
Not sure who came up with the name. I’m pretty sure they didn’t give it to themselves.
Trace holds a bottle out to me. I hate beer. I’m sure I told him at some point.
“Where are my keys?” I ask.
“You know where they are.”
He holds a bottle in each hand, taking a long swig out of one.
I blink at him. “Would you go get them, please? Like a gentleman?”
We went out on their boat last time I was here, and he drove me home from there. I need my car back now.
But he just teases, “You may have left other things. May as well go look.”
I arch a brow, reading into his ploy to get me into his room. I start up the stairs. “Like my vibrator?” I grumble. “I used it here more than at my house.”
“So rude.”
He starts up the stairs after me, and I keep my laugh to myself. I didn’t come a lot with Trace, but to be fair, I didn’t expect to.
Nor do I think he was trying that hard.
I’d read somewhere that the majority of women can’t orgasm through penetration, so I gathered I was part of that majority.
Sometimes I made him slow down so I could help myself get there. I used my vibrator a lot here, as it turns out.
He’s a good kisser, though. Touching him and being close to him felt good, and for a while, feeling him helped me forget about my troubles.
For a while anyway.
At the top of the stairs, I pass his sister’s closed door and smile a little, because I know I’ll see her in a few weeks when she’s home for Thanksgiving. The bathroom and Macon’s room are on the right, his door closed as well, and I spot Iron and Dallas’s room ahead, to the left of Trace’s.
Army’s is closed, his son’s cries now quiet, and there’s a door in the far corner, always shut. I’ve never seen anyone go in or out of there.
“Why didn’t you want to come to the party?” Trace asks, following me into his room as I go to his desk that’s simply a dumping ground for discarded junk.
I start moving things, looking for my keys. “You mean the one today as opposed to the one yesterday?”
I meet his green eyes for a quick glance, seeing him smile. I look away, feeling that familiar flutter in my tummy. That easy smile was all it took when this one-night stand started six months ago.
“You’re not the only thing I have to do in life, Trace.”
Doors slam downstairs, the house growing quieter as engines fade away down the street.
“Oh, come on, Ms. Conroy.” He sets one of the beers down, coming up behind me and taking my waist in one hand. “You love coming down here to the servants’ quarters to get serviced.”
I shake my head, lifting a tackle box and prying up a greasy car part. “You don’t need me,” I tell him. “There are plenty of girls hanging around your house.”
I glance at the mussed bed.
He nuzzles into my ear. “I like to think about seeing you around town for the next fifty years,” he tells me, “pretending to be a sweet, southern wife when I know what you look like underneath me. I’ll see you.
You’ll see me. We’ll smile as we pass on the sidewalk, remembering.
Clock’s ticking, Conroy. May as well have some fun while you can. ”
There’s a lightheartedness in his twenty-year-old voice that I love, but it always gives me pause, too. He’s never serious, and after six months of playing around together, I’m starting to suspect it’s on purpose.
I stop looking for my keys. “You know I don’t think of you like that, right? As a servant, I mean?”
His family has more money than mine at this point. My parents are locked in a divorce battle, and my father left us nothing while they duke it out. The Jaegers, on the contrary, probably aren’t as poor as they like to seem.